IN AN UNPRECEDENTED ANTI-SRI LANKAN MOVE BRITAIN IS GOING TO BLOCKADE THE IMF LOAN
Posted on July 24th, 2009

By Walter Jayawardhana

BritainƒÆ’‚¢ƒ¢-¡‚¬ƒ¢-¾‚¢s Foreign Secretary David Miliband who travelled to Sri Lanka to save Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam leader Velupillai Prabhakaran wilL also take the unprecedented move of doing everything to block the IMF loan to Sri Lanka , according to a news story appearing in the Times online.

The Reuter correspondent who wrote the news story using British government sources said the reasons for trying to blockade the loan are Sri LankaƒÆ’‚¢ƒ¢-¡‚¬ƒ¢-¾‚¢s inability to do the impossible: Keeping the army without reducing it and keeping the IDPƒÆ’‚¢ƒ¢-¡‚¬ƒ¢-¾‚¢s in camps because the demining operations at the civilian settlements are not yet over.

Sri Lanka needs the army to consolidate the military victory as the LTTE is threatening to rekindle its terrorist activities and to engage them in the huge infrastructure developments undertaken by the government in the war ravaged areas.

Britain, by wanting to stop those activities , are apparently trying to once again destabilize Sri Lanka, critics said.

Immediately after the war was over former Army Commander General Sarath Fonseka said Britain wanted to get Prabhakaran released to destabilize Sri Lanka and India in the coming years.

The Times on line said, ƒÆ’‚¢ƒ¢-¡‚¬ƒ…-The loan was being discussed by the executive board of the IMF in Washington tonight, which was due to vote on whether to approve it when the discussion ended. Britain holds 5 per cent of the votes on the board and would have to have the support of several countries to block the loan, which needs 51 per cent of the votes to pass. The US, the largest IMF donor, holds 17 per cent of the votes; Germany 6 per cent and France 5 per cent.

ƒÆ’‚¢ƒ¢-¡‚¬ƒ…-The loan had already been delayed after the US and Britain sought to leverage the IMF money in a failed attempt to force a Sri Lankan Army ceasefire in May, to allow hundreds of thousands of civilians to escape the battle zone during the conflictƒÆ’‚¢ƒ¢-¡‚¬ƒ¢-¾‚¢s brutal climax.

ƒÆ’‚¢ƒ¢-¡‚¬ƒ…-The British Government still believes the loan should not be approved, a stance that British officials said is unprecedented because it indicates that humanitarian concerns should be taken into account by the IMF, which has traditionally only factored in economic arguments.ƒÆ’‚¢ƒ¢-¡‚¬ƒ”š‚

Britain is in fact, trying to block the IMF loan, by trying to change the rules of the game as they could not win in their earlier attempts to help the LTTE.

The Labour government is extremely unpopular in the United Kingdom and was routed by the Conservative Party in the by-election in Norwich North. Tory leader David Cameron today hailed the Tories’ by-election victory in Norwich North as a “historic” result for his party and claimed it showed that the public had “had enough” of the Labour government in power.

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